The Green Integer Blog supplements our Green Integer website with essays on various cultural topics by editor/publisher Douglas Messerli, along with a listing of Green Integer titles and information on our new books. Please note that all essays and commentary are copyrighted by the author, Douglas Messerli, and may not be republished without permission.

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Thursday, August 29, 2013

The Poetics of Bewilderment (on Charles Bernstein's Recalculating)

the poetics of bewilderment

by Douglas Messerli

Charles
Bernstein Recalculating (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Given
the wide range of his publishing, teaching, and performative activities, it is
hard to imagine that this year’s collection of poems, Recalculating, is Charles Bernstein's first full-length collection of new poetry in
seven years. Of course, that does not include the wonderful selected poems
published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in All
the Whiskey in Heaven (2011). Nonetheless, there is something different,
almost groundbreaking, about a work which, through its title, admits of a
“change of direction” resulting from a wrong or mistaken turn.

The “turn” for Bernstein is nearly
everything: the tragic death of his daughter, Emma, old age (or, at least, the
recognition that one is growing older), and the not-so-simple vicissitudes that
define themselves in maturity. And this is, accordingly, a darker, mature
work—not that anyone could possibly describe Bernstein’s work to be without
seriousness of purpose before this. Indeed some might argue that Bernstein has,
from the very start, written in a mature voice, as if he had almost been born
as an older man. But there was a kind of brightness—despite the darkness
sometimes of the subject matter—in early works such as “Sentences My Father
Used” or “Controlling Interests,” a lightness of method in his “clumsy,
clumpsy” approach to language. As Bernstein admits, time and again, in this new
work—something I don’t think he would have claimed in his other works—he seeks
“not to remember,” (“I write to forget”) and, as he brilliantly expresses it
through a variation of Baudelaire’s “Enivrez-vous,” a desire to remain drunk
(even if one may also be drunk on poetry or virtue), or as he expresses it in
the little poem “Later”:

Wake me when the
movie’s over

Let me sleep till
then

Wake me when I care
no longer

To ever get sober
again

This
kind of darkened vision appears over and over in Recalculating, as, in often heart-breaking admissions, this
professor of poetry (and Bernstein, more than anyone I know might be described
throughout his life as one who professed his passion for poetry) questions his
own limitations, his own knowledge:

Each day I know less
than the day before. People say that you

learn something from
such experiences [presumably Emma’s death];

but I don’t want
that knowledge and for me there are no

fruits to these
experiences, only ashes. I can’t and don’t want

to “heal”; perhaps,
though, go on in the full force of my dys-

abilities,
coexisting with a brokenness that cannot be accom-

modated, in the dark. (“Recalculating”)

Or,
as he quotes Wilde in “The Truth in Pudding”:

But the world will
never weary of watching that troubled soul

in its progress from
darkness to darkness.

It is not that Bernstein has abandoned his
older ideas; indeed, this poet has always sought out what he describes as a
“poetics of bewilderment” (“How Empty Is My Bread Pudding”). And his push
toward fragmentation in the form of “disjunction, ellipsis, constellation”
(“The Truth In Pudding”) would have been equally at home in his early book of
poetics Content’s Dream, where he
argued for a language that moves toward denseness and opacity in order to
“actually map the fullness of thought and its movement.” Yet, we also recognize that something
stylistically different in occurring in this most recent work. Bernstein has
often in the past combined what one might call “poetics” with “poetry,” refusing to
distinguish between the two, the one being what the poet creates in writing his
“poems,” but the major works of Recalculating
take that even further, combining in five larger works—“The Truth in
Pudding,” “How Empty Is My Bread Pudding,” “Manifest Aversions, Conceptual
Conundrums, and Implausibly Deniable Links,” “Unready, Unwilling, Unable,”
and “Recalculating,” what might be described as a combination of diary-like
comments, aphorisms in the manner of Stein and Wilde, poetic quotations, and
personal revelations. Strangely, these multi-genre works seem to be the most
representative in this volume of Bernstein’s thinking, as he winds his car of
the mind through the twisted streets of his thinking, braking, even stopping
momentarily to move forward again with gusto. The result not only defines what
the poet means by “recalculating,” but represents what he clearly perceives as
his winding journey through life, moving on through “disjunction, ellipsis,
constellation,” and, perhaps, most importantly, a now flawed memory.

If Bernstein argues that he wants to
forget, he is also desperate to remember, to bring all theassimilated (and
even his unassimilated) past into a new future. This poet has often “recreated”
the works of other poets, but in this volume we note that Bernstein is, at times,
almost repeating the structure of one of my earlier books, After, rewriting, reinterpreting, and remaking poems by figures as
various as Baudelaire, Pessoa, Leevi Lehto, Osip Mandelstam, Sylvia Plath,
Frost, Régis Bonvicino, Wallace Stevens, Cole Porter (via Chaucer), Walt
Whitman, Paul Celan, Velimir Khlebnikov, Paolo Leminski, Juão Cabral de Melo
Neto, Victor Hugo, Guilliaume Apollinaire, William Wordsworth, Nerval, and even
me (a work that certainly captures the sense of the poem on which it was based).
Some of these are among the strongest works in this volume, particularly the
Baudelaire, Hugo, and Apollinaire imitations; but all are interesting in that
they reveal a great postmodern poet (Bernstein’s definition of “Postmoderism”:
modernism with a deep sense of guilt) exploring international poets of the
past and present.

In “The Jew,” dedicated to Jerome
Rothenberg, and certainly among the best of works of this volume, Bernstein
takes on voices of legendary rabbis, using the often convoluted and sometimes
inverted logic of the Talmud to make another “turn” in the voyage, often
toppling many seemingly logical propositions. Even more tellingly, the poet, at
points, returns to his own past poetry, toting up the most frequent word
choices in his earlier poetry collection Girly
Man, with its satiric title-poem
that points to then-California governor and movie-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger,
and creating a poem through the last words of his early masterwork “Sentences
My Father Used.” Along with homages to fellow friends and poets, this
collection can be seen—although certainly not exclusively—as a kind of
self-reflective, meditative map of Bernstein’s life, a true “recalculating” of
what the voyage to date has meant, and where he might be going in the future.
And, in that sense, despite the usual humor and high-jinx of all of
Bernstein’s wonderful poetic explorations, it is a “darker” book.

I say that, obviously, with some distress;
it is always a bit startling when the total optimism of one’s youth meets up
with “Charon’s Boat” (the title of one of Bernstein’s poems).Or as he expresses the difference in “Today
Is the Last Day of Your Life 'til Now”: “I was the luckiest father in the world
/ until I turned unluckiest.”

If things take a turn into a darker road,
more frightening for both poet and his readers—I say this as a long-optimistic
poet whose most recent book itself is titled Dark—these poems also continue a long trip begun as early as the
poem “Long Trails of Cars Returning from the Beach,” of 1978, in which the
traveling poet also gets ensnarled in traffic, unable to move forward. And its
first Whitman-cum-Ginsberg inspired lines “I saw the power / of the word in /
legend,” almost mirrors Bernstein’s somewhat darker position today: “The poem
is a constant transformation of itself.”

The works of Recalculating brilliantly reveal just that realization as they turn
in on themselves and the sources behind the originals from which these works
have risen like phoenixes to express a possible new present. Like a naughty
schoolboy, Bernstein scrawls across one of his pages “I will not write
imitative poetry.” 16 times, and despite his use of numerous pre-existent
sources, he lives up to his promise.